This is a comparative study in the oral history, world view and cultural ecology of three colonies of Maya Indians who have been displaced from their home community of San Juan Chamula at various times in the Twentieth Century. The three groups left home for reasons of: 1) political exile, 2) religious persecution, and 3) search for new agricultural lands. The study presents 1) a case study in comparative cultural ecology; that is, three different ways in which new communities have sprung from a single parent community, and how, perhaps why, they are alike and different from one another and from the parent community; 2) a systematic demonstration of the malleability of "historical consciousness" and oral tradition according to environmental, economic, ethnic, political, educational and ideological factors; of how "conceptions of the past" and "conceptions of place" function as adaptive factors in the establishment and persistence of new settlements; 3) a case study in strains of modernization (e.g. Protestantism) and traditionalism (e.g. ethnic revitalization) which occur in a single minority population in modern Mexico.